


Waiting Game

by Aegir



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Timeline changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 15:03:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4611207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you could change one thing in your past, would you do it?  Steve Rogers couldn’t resist, and now James Barnes is stuck in Limbo.  Both of him.  Steve only wanted to save Bucky from the fall, but he didn’t stop to consider what the Soldier wanted. </p>
<p>Inspired by Doctor Who Series Six, and especially The Girl Who Waited.  Because somebody needed to do it with Bucky and Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting Game

**Author's Note:**

> Not a happy ending story, although just how unhappy is left open

He wakes, or perhaps merely opens his eyes. Around him there is as close to nothing as something, or anything, can be. Not quite white and not quite grey, there is smooth and solid ground beneath, but even his enhanced eyes can hardly pick out any texture or tell the place where the wall curves into the floor. It is a curve, not an angle, he can tell as he runs his flesh fingers over it. The walls are curved, in a seemingly random way with bulges and indents; the ceiling if there is one is above the reach of his arms. It is hard to judge width, because there is no straightness.

He has no weapons, though his metal arm is still functioning. He has no memory of how he came here, and that more than anything makes his throat close in fear. He has to set his back against one of the uneven walls, and practise deep breathing exercises until he can grasp himself again.

The most hopeful explanation is that this is a dream. He doubts it though because his dreams don’t tend to be this empty. The worst explanation is it is HYDRA’s work, that they have him trapped in his own mind, that this was their latest way of carving him out. There had been no sensation of dread when he woke up here, and this is the only thing he can hold to, because no matter how brutal the wipes his body always remembered fear.

The last possibility is that he is in Purgatory. It’s not Hell, he has been there. Purgatory is more than he had hoped for, but he had not wanted to leave life so soon; not with so much to find again still, not with so much he needed to give back.

He considers of course the possibility this is a real place, but it seems so unlikely he discards it. Why would anyone go to the trouble of building something like this? There would be far easier ways to torture him.

Since there is nothing else to do he explores, his flesh hand on the wall to guide him. It’s impossible for even his mind to keep track of direction, though he has nowhere to aim for anyway so it doesn’t matter very much. Sometimes he can just pick out a branching of paths; probably there are more his eyes miss. There is light here, but he cannot find a source, it just is. There is no sound except from himself: footfalls, breaths, heartbeats. No smell. Close to nothing.

He can’t get out. He can move around freely, but he’s trapped all the same, a caught in a neverending maze, completely alone. He keeps going, because what else is there? Twice he has to stop, use every calming technique he’s learned (thanks Wilson, thanks Banner), twice he gets up and goes on because going on is better than staying still.

The he comes to a junction that is different from the others, in the centre there rises a tangle of gleaming metal that might be sculpture or just a wreck, from an angle the whole thing reminds him of a pile of guns, but everything reminds him of guns unless it reminds him of corpses.

He takes a turn at random, and that’s when he sees the first person there has been in this whole collection of blankness.

It’s a man in a faded blue jacket, pacing back and forth, just as he has paced, trying to calm himself. A man his exact height, with his face shorn a few pain lines. Steve Rogers’ Bucky.

He doesn’t think he makes a sound, so it’s likely only coincidence that Bucky turns and looks straight at him but straight through him, scanning the area, not seeing his future at all.

The man Bucky was tortured into becoming bolts, and it is many twists of the corridor before he lets himself sink to the ground. “Why?” His own voice echoes in the silence.

After a while he goes on again, because it’s all there is. This time as he walks he finds the air around has begun to form occasional shapes, grey outlines about the size of a human, but with no obvious limbs. They fade in for a time and fade out. They might be ghosts, he thinks, but perhaps the ghost is him.

He finds after a while that the ways keep leading back to the crossroads with the metal tangle. He always turns back, veers away before he can get there. He makes himself keep moving, until at last, just as he finds he is approaching the crossroads yet again, another figure fades into view. Fading is exactly how it happens: a grey shape, then a dim outline, like a washed out drawing, then finally a solid figure. Steve Rogers in civilian clothes. Rogers is not looking at him, he’s looking ahead, and there can be no doubt who he has seen. His face lights in the brightest of smiles, the smile captured on tape on the Smithsonian, the smile hardly ever seen in this century. The smile he had once given Bucky Barnes.

The man who still wavers on what name to call himself, who can’t feel he is Bucky but who is something more than Asset, who answers to Barnes but often feels more like Soldier, that man bolts again, loses himself in the turning pathways. Not quite quickly enough, not fast enough to stop himself from looking, seeing what he knew he would see. Bucky, young, with two good arms.

It is Purgatory then. He vaguely wishes he knew how he’d died. He sits for a while, hair hanging forward. But finally he makes himself stand and walk. There is nothing else to do.

The emptiness continues. He looks uneasily round for other figures fading in, as Steve Rogers had done, the thought of who they might be putting him on edge. The tension tightens his shoulder and neck muscles, pulling uncomfortably at the seam where the flesh met metal. It’s a familiar painful circle, creating more tension which tightens the muscles more. He hadn’t expected something so mundanely uncomfortable in the afterlife.

He’d really like to soak his tense muscles in a bath right now. Such a simple thing, to choke in his throat, the thought he won’t ever again have the chance to soak in his bath with the stain on the wall behind the taps that won’t come out. Such a simple thing, one of the first pleasures he’d known, the act of soaking his body in warmth, being able to do it alone, as long as he likes. Such a simple thing; like the book he’d been saving for the weekend, or the diner Wilson recommended. Or his apartment itself, paid for with what Stark tells him is seventy years of army backpay although he strongly suspects it’s conscience money, since it’s come out Stark’s father had designed the metal arm without ever looking too closely into who Zola wanted it for.

He’d never wanted to die, even the times he was sure he deserved it, but it’s harder now he’s started to fill a space shaped like a person in the world. Target practice with Barton, egging each other on to more and more ridiculous shots on Stark’s ridiculous customised range. Mrs Ramirez downstairs, who thinks he served in Iraq (he killed someone in Iraq once), and worries about whether he’s sleeping well. She’ll probably wonder what happened to him for a week or two. Steve’s friends will say for Steve’s sake his death is sad, just as they’d been polite to him for Steve’s sake, although he thinks Romanoff might have been doing it to fight past fears she hated having. She’s stopped tensing round him for a few weeks now, stopped reflexively rubbing her side or her shoulder. He’d been glad of her victory, she’d more than earned it.

Steve Rogers will be sad, because he’ll think he ought to be. Because it still meant something to him that Bucky’s body was walking and breathing. He wonders if Rogers was there when he died, and hopes not. Rogers doesn’t deserve to have to remember that.

It happens unexpectedly in the end; he takes another turn and almost runs into Rogers. It’s a near enough miss that Rogers puts out a hand to steady them both, and the feel of it on his arm startles a gasp, because it is as warm and solid as if he were living and Rogers were real. But then why shouldn’t it do so, why should he suppose this world cannot create facsimiles perfect in every way?

“Bucky,” Rogers says, and he sounds relieved, there’s even a small, tense, smile. Barnes looks away. “I was beginning to think I’d never find you.” Barnes says nothing, because whatever form of punishment this is, it’s useless trying to avoid it. “This is going to take a while to explain.” Rogers goes on, “I did something careless.”

Barnes’ heart constricts in fear then, in case this is the real Steve Rogers, in case Steve is dead, is trapped, just like him. Surely, he tells himself, surely Steve wouldn’t end up in Purgatory. Still his voice rasps as he says “What did you do?”

“We’d better sit down,” Steve says, so they sit on the floor, with their backs to one unsettlingly uneven wall.

“The thing we were tracking, the mission…”

“Yeah.” He remembers Steve having a mission with Thor and Stark. It’s the last one he remembers, but then he still can’t remember anything that might have led to him dying, so what does he know?

“When we found it, well, Thor called it a Time Gem. He said it could change the past if you willed hard enough.”

“You didn’t…” Ice-cold horror chokes out his certainty this story isn’t real, because this is such a very Steve Rogers thing to do. Of course he knows what Rogers would try and change. The rushing of wind as his body hurtles downwards…. “You tried to stop...”

“I wanted to save you,” Rogers says, so earnest.

His throat has closed up, and his stomach churns, hollowly. He’d known how things were. Of course he’d known, long before he’d seen Roger’s brilliant smile as he looked at the other Barnes. But how could he have expected this?

Steve ducks his head, a sure sign he knows he’s messed up somehow. “Thor thinks I didn’t have it clear enough in my mind what I intended. To save you, of course, but I hadn’t thought beyond that, hadn’t thought what should follow. And because my taking Schmidt’s plane down had a big effect on history, history is cracking. It’s trying to reform itself, but doesn’t know the shape. It could settle into a shape where Red Skull’s plan succeeded, or one where the alien invaders won or something else that’s terrible. Because I wasn’t careful enough.”

“Because you tried to change things!” Barnes says, and he can’t help the bitterness in his voice.

“Because I tried to protect you.” And he can tell Rogers still doesn’t get it. The world’s going to hell, he probably doesn’t exist and if he’s not careful he’s going to start laughing and not be able to stop. That’s a horrifying thought, so he clamps down hard.

“So what now? Is there a plan?” There better be, there better be something that isn’t eternity with the memory of Steve Rogers smiling like sunrise at a dead man. Steve Rogers saying, ‘I wanted to save you.’

They’d been doing better. They had.

“Jane and Eric Selvig have worked out a theory. Because the time fracture was centred on you, you’re here, in this place, until the time resets itself properly. It’s a real mess right now. Different bits keep breaking through, there was a giant statue of Hitler in Times Square for a while, and another time it seemed like a new Ice Age was starting. I hated that one. Jane thinks anyone who dies won’t stay dead. Not until history is fixed.”

“Can it be?”

“We worked out a history, a new history that is. One that saves you and keeps the rest the same.” Roger’s mouth turned down, a sure sign he didn’t like what he was about to say. “I’m sorry, Buck, but Jane thinks there’s a chance it won’t work. She thinks…”

“History will shatter?”  

“No, at least, Jane doesn’t think so, not if I think it hard enough. I didn’t follow it well, there’s probably only about six people on Earth who could, but Jane thinks the point is to get history clear, separate it into new and old. And there’s a chance it could snap back into the old. That it would be for nothing.”

The Soldier hadn’t thought his mouth could get drier. A chance. But he’d never been lucky.

Steve has taken something out, a casket, lead he thinks. The Soldier’s eyes lock on the fastening. This must be it then. The crystal. It doesn’t look like much.

“To make the connection I need the younger you,” Steve is saying. “But I couldn’t reach him. I saw him here,” he pauses as if suddenly aware this might need explaining. “He is here. As well.”

The Soldier makes himself say, “I know.”

“I saw him, but when I tried to reach him I always got turned around, always found I was heading away.” Steve’s voice cracks then, “He never saw me.”

That’s when his heart twists with Steve’s pain, and he’s angry, because isn’t he shouldering enough now, without hurting for Steve because his Bucky had been so very near yet not near enough to touch. But then he remembers blood blooming on a woman’s dress in Johannesburg, and knows he has no right to anger.

“I had to go back through the portal,” Steve says, “Jane thinks, she’s sure, you’re the key. That if I could find you, then we could both find the other you, and I’d be able to reach him. Then I make things right, stop you falling.”

“Do you have to?” It takes effort to force it out. “Couldn’t you picture history the way it was? Couldn’t you just put it back?”

“I suppose,” Steve says, “But why would I when I can-”

“No!” It bursts out of him. “You want to erase me. Wipe me out of existence.”

“Bucky, no, no, it’s not-”

“Yes, it is.   You’ll change things and I won’t exist. I’ll never have existed. I won’t even be dead, at least someone who’s dead has lived.”

“No. You’ll be there. You’ll just be different, you’ll be, you won’t have...” Rogers is stumbling now over the words. He’s trying to not to be hurtful.

“Why don’t you just say it,” the Soldier says. “You mean better, don’t you? Not damaged goods.”

“I’ve never called you that.”

“You didn’t have to. Of course you want him back. Anyone would rather have him, anyone would rather have a whole person. But I’m the damaged goods, that’s me, you can’t just wipe that out and say nothing’s changed. He’s not me. That past you want to wipe out, that makes me who I am. You stop him falling, he’ll never be me.” He knows he should never have been made.   But he’d worked so hard to become more than a weapon, learned enough about acting like a person some days he can even fool himself. And all that work’s going to be wiped out, for nothing, will never have been.

“So you won’t help him,” Rogers says, after a pause, and maybe he does see a little after all, because his face looks drained, and so much older. “You’re going to leave him to have his arm torn off, be tortured, have his mind torn out. You’ll leave him to suffer.”

“Why not?” Barnes says harshly. “Nobody came for me.” He feels bad about Rogers’ flinch, but he’s done so much feeling bad for Rogers, after months of the man looking like someone just killed his dog in front of him whenever Barnes is in the room. So many months knowing that Steve Rogers would have been happier in the here and now if someone, sometime, had put a bullet through the Asset’s head before Rogers ever set eyes on him. That way Rogers could have finished his grieving for Bucky Barnes cleanly, and never had to know how slow and hard his friend had died.

They’ve been doing better. There’ve been whole days lately where he never got that dead dog look at all. There’ve been times when Steve has managed to be talking with Wilson or Romanov in front of Barnes, looking as close to happy as he gets. There’s even been the odd dry, shared joke on a mission, almost took his breath away the first time. They weren’t friends whatever Rogers liked to fool himself, probably wouldn’t ever be, but they’d been doing better.

“Do you think he deserves that?” Rogers says. “ Deserves everything they’ll do, if you don’t let me save him?”

“So you think I deserve to be erased.” It’s a low blow, he knows. “At least he had twenty-eight years of living.”  

“So you won’t help,” and Steve sounds beaten now, defeated. But there’s never been a contest really, just as there has never been a choice.

“Not for him,” Barnes says. “And not for you.” If he were a better person he’d do it for Steve Rogers because he owes the man everything. It was only Rogers’ implacable defence that had kept him out of a cell when he’d finally got so tired of running he’d been willing to let the world bury him. Rogers had fought for him then, as fiercely as he’d fought on the helicarriers, and the fact he’d only done it because Barnes was in the body of his oldest friend didn’t change the debt. It was only because of Rogers he’d ever had a chance to live, and a better man would have wiped himself from life in repayment and been glad of the chance. But he has debts far bloodier than the one he owes Steve Rogers.

“I will do it,” he says. “I’ll do it for the dead. For the people I killed.”

And Rogers exclaims, “That wasn’t your fault!” Apparently he has some kind of Pavlov’s dog reflex that activates whenever the Soldier’s murders are brought up.

“Doesn’t matter now whose fault it was. Point is they get a chance to live if there’s no Winter Soldier around.”

“You don’t know that. They were on HYDRA’s kill list anyway, HYDRA could simply have used some other way.”

“You trying to talk me out of this now, Rogers?” There’s a still, bleak silence. “They might die anyway. Or they might not. We can’t know. But if this will save just one… It isn’t a choice.”

He wonders for a second, bleakly, if Steve’s Pavlov reflex is strong enough for him to start giving some kind of pep talk along the lines of ‘Your life isn’t worth less than anyone else’s,’ like he’d given the time Barnes had stopped some bullets with his own body on a mission. But it seems even Rogers realises that would be a bad joke now.  

“I can’t leave him,” is what Steve says. “He was always there for me, always. I can’t leave him now.”

Of course not. Childhood best friend set against whatever the hell Barnes is. That’s not a choice either.

“Will you remember?” Barnes asks. “Any of this I mean.”

“Jane thinks not,” Steve says. “She thinks when the world resets our memories will too. We’ll think the new reality was the one that’s always been.”

So he won’t even linger as a ghost in Steve Rogers’s memory.

“What do I need to do?” he says.

The crystal is quite small. “Take it in your hand and remember him,” Rogers says.

He does. He thinks of seeing the man in the corridor, wary in his war jacket. He thinks of the photographs, photographs of Bucky smart in his dress uniform, of him young and gap-toothed and beaming. He thinks of the old film, and how bright the men had smiled.

He’d wanted to be Bucky. Who wouldn’t rather be Bucky than him?

“How long’s it supposed to take?” he asks, when nothing happens, and Rogers hasn’t moved.

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be this long. You are thinking of him?”

“I’m trying, dammit,” Barnes snaps, because he is. He’s remembering Bucky.

No, he’s remembering looking at Bucky. Looking at pictures and film, and glimpses through broken time. That’s why it’s not working, anyone could remember looking at pictures. He’s supposed to remember being Bucky.

He does have memories. Maybe not as many as someone whose brain had been left alone would have, but he has some. He knows they’re not his, they’re just leftovers, like a hard drive imperfectly erased. But they are there. He can picture what Bucky saw with his own eyes, heard with his own ears.

So he takes a deep breath and pictures being Bucky. Pictures looking up at the man with the lined face and the woman with grey in her bun. Pictures little girl hands in his, and bright childish voices and long braids. Pictures the table scrubbed clean, and the voice scolding fondly for leaving mud on the floor. Games of tag in the street. A small blond boy, grinning with a split lip. He tries to skip over the bad bits.

He pictures a dance hall, hears the swing of the music and the laughter of a girl. Thinks of the pride with which he sewed on his sergeant’s stripes. He remembers Steve Rogers in a bar, at ease and smiling.

He doesn’t quite manage to cut off before he remembers falling.

“Look,” Rogers’ voice jerks him back to whenever they are now, and see sees before him a wall dissolving parting, a new pathway opening and down it…

This time it’s not just a shock, it’s disorienting. He’d been in Bucky’s head a moment earlier and maybe it was the crystal, but it was the first time he’d remembered how it was to be Bucky Barnes. How alive it had been. Not because he doesn’t have feelings, or the feelings aren’t strong, but he doesn’t have the range that Bucky did. He’s never had the chance.

Bucky had loved being alive. Maybe that was why he’d died so hard.

Rogers takes the crystal from his unresisting hand. He has a sudden violent impulse to beg for an embrace, a last contact of warm living flesh, but he’s afraid if he gives into that impulse he won’t be able to let go. So he just watches as Rogers starts away, towards his Bucky. Rogers doesn’t offer any words, perhaps because he knows there are none for this. He does pause though, pauses and half-turns back. And he salutes. Salutes the Soldier.

It’s a relief when the wall closes behind him. Barnes couldn’t have torn his eyes away, but he hadn’t wanted to see.

He lets himself slide to the ground, his body slumping. His face is wet. He hadn’t known he could cry.

There’s still the chance it won’t work. He’ll have to live with the memory of Steve’s smile bright as sunrise, as he saw the man he’d lost. They’d both have to live with the knowledge that Rogers’ litanies of ‘I don’t care that you’ve changed’ and ‘You are still yourself’ had been exposed for the lies they always were. He’d have to live with the memory, but that’s so much better than being erased. But he shouldn’t think like that. He should hope it works, for the sake of lives taken too soon, and two men far better than him.

He never asked what history Rogers had thought out for Bucky. Would he picture his friend going down on Schmidt’s plane with him, waking in the twenty-first century together? Or would he send Bucky home at the war’s end, back to his family to grow old through the decades? Doesn’t much matter to him, though it will matter a lot to Bucky.

He wonders if he’ll know, if he’ll feel the moment of erasing, his self being wiped away as his memories had so often been by HYDRA’s chair. Or will he simply blink out of existence between one heartbeat and the next?

“I have lived,” he says, in a desperate whisper, over and over. “I have lived, I have lived, I have lived.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is deliberately open-ended. I have no plans for a sequel.


End file.
